Joey Sternaman was something of a prodigal son for the early Bears teams of the 1920s. Twice the groundbreaking quarterback left the team for what he felt could be better opportunities. Twice he was welcomed back to lead the founding franchise in the NFL’s first decade.

George Halas, never one to forget a slight, had a frosty relationship with his first great quarterback for nearly 40 years before the two made up in old age. Sternaman’s talent, intelligence and toughness made it an easy decision for Papa Bear to allow him back into the fold.

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Like Halas, Sternaman played at Illinois. The bigger connection was that his older brother, Dutch, co-founded the Bears with Halas and was one of their first great players.

Halas moved his Decatur Staleys to Chicago and won the championship of the American Professional Football League in 1921. In 1922, the league was renamed the National Football League, the A.E. Staley corn-processing plant pulled its sponsorship of Halas’ team, halfback Dutch Sternaman stepped in as co-owner and the franchise was rebranded as the Bears.

The new quarterback/kicker for the new-look team was 22-year-old Joey Sternaman.

1922-25, 1927-30: 8 seasons, 94 games

Bears record: 62-32-14 (.639);

Acquired: Signed in 1922 out of Illinois

Joey came to the NFL amid murky circumstances after Illinois terminated the senior-to-be’s eligibility. He was found to have participated, with seven other Illini players also using pseudonyms, in a grudge match between town teams from Taylorville, which had the Illini players, and Carlinville, which had recruited ringers from Notre Dame. As the Tribune reported: “The team on which the Illinois players performed won by a 9 to 0 score, Sternaman kicking three field goals.”

The game resulted in one of college sports’ first “cleanups,” with Illinois and Notre Dame expelling all the players who participated — including several All-Americans — because of the semipro nature of the game.

Sternaman scored 25 touchdowns — 20 rushing, four receiving and one punt return — and passed for 10 while making 13 field goals and 56 extra points in eight seasons with the Bears. In Joey’s rookie year of 1922, he and Dutch — who played for the Bears through the 1927 season and continued on the business side until Halas bought him out for $38,000 in 1931 — combined to score 73 of the Bears’ 123 points.

In 1923, Joey Sternaman joined the expansion Duluth Kelleys before rejoining the Bears. In 1926, he accepted a position as owner of the Chicago Bulls of Red Grange’s new American Professional Football League. The league lasted only one year, and Sternaman returned to the Bears for his final four seasons. He served as head coach for both the Kelleys and Bulls.

The Bears went 62-32-14 in Joey Sternaman’s tenure. He was named first-team All-Pro in 1924 and ’25. Despite always being one of his team’s smallest players at 5-foot-6 and 135 to 150 pounds, he also always was one of the toughest.

“139-pound Joe Sternaman could wreck any 200- or 250-pound man he ever saw in a rough-and-tumble,” Grantland Rice wrote in a 1942 column celebrating the “little big men” of sports. “(Illinois coach) Bob Zuppke ... once told me that he was too quick, too smart and too rough.”

In a 1980 feature on the then-80-year-old Sternaman, the Tribune’s Jeff Lyon credited him with pioneering the use of the run-pass option (“He would run eight yards to the side and if he spotted a receiver, he’d throw; if not, he’d just keep going.”) and, using Grange as a decoy, the bootleg. He also noted that Sternaman’s grip could still crack a walnut.

After football, the Springfield native owned and operated the Sternaman Cast Iron Smoke Pipe Co., which made and installed pipes for incinerators.

“He was kind of like a bulldog, very tenacious,” his daughter Joyce Howe told the Tribune’s Kenan Heise after Sternaman’s death at 88 in 1988 in Oak Park. “My father was a strong and vital person with a tremendous amount of physical strength. He was very proud and assertively independent. He did his own thing.”

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As part of the Chicago Tribune’s coverage of the Bears’ 100th season, the Tribune’s Bears reporters and editors ranked the 100 best players in franchise history. Click here for the full list.